Adobe Photoshop has gone through numerous revisions over the years, but its sky-high popularity and massive image-editing toolkit are two aspects that have remained consistent in the app. Heck, the fact that many still herald Photoshop as the be-all and end-all photo editing software over three decades after its release speaks volumes about the app’s immense usefulness.

Plus, Photoshop has an array of third-party plugins designed to improve its functionality in both the consumer and professional fields. But since sifting through them can be rather tiresome, we’ve compiled a list of the five best Photoshop plugins to spare you the trouble of going through waves upon waves of tools.

5 Eye Candy

To add eye-catching VFX to your images

If you’ve worked with lighting and other visual effect filters, you may already know that they’re somewhat of a double-edged sword. If they combine well, they can make your posters and illustrations look extremely appealing, but poor synchrony between the VFX and the rest of the design elements can ruin a perfectly good image.

That’s where Eye Candy comes in… well, handy. It’s a paid plugin with various textures, lighting, and other effects, alongside multiple controls and presets to modify them as per your needs.

4 StockSolo

Perfect for grabbing reference images

From backgrounds to UI elements, stock images have a lot of use cases in graphic design. Not to mention, these images can often serve as reference material if you’re stuck in a creative rut. However, gathering them can be a bit of a hassle, especially when you need to sign up to download the stock images from certain free websites.

Available free of charge, StockSolo aggregates stock images from multiple sources, including Pexels, Pixabay, and Unsplash. Plus, it’s also compatible with the other apps in the Adobe Create Cloud suite, making it a neat addition if your workspace consists entirely of Adobe’s offerings.

3 Auto Photoshop Stable Diffusion

Integrate AI images into your workflow

AI-powered image generation may have been wrought with issues in the past, but the technology has progressed to the point where select image generation models can produce images that are indistinguishable from actual photos. Stable Diffusion is one such model, and it’s possible to bring its powerful text-to-image generation capabilities to your Photoshop project.

Developed by talented Technical Artist Abdullah Alfaraj, the Auto Photoshop Stable Diffusion lets you access Stable Diffusion within Photoshop. Although it may take a couple of minutes to properly configure it, this plugin can be quite the lifesaver for those who require a painless way to generate and import AI images into Photoshop.

2 Nik Collection

Solid tool set for all your image editing needs

So far, the plugins we’ve included on this list are only good for a specific scenario, be it adding visual effects or gathering stock images. However, the paid Nik Collection plugin is more of a Swiss army knife as it contains useful tools that pair well with most projects.

Besides the amazing Control Points feature that lets you isolate specific elements of an image, the latest version of the Nik collection toolkit contains several color filters and camera effects to change the luminosity, brightness, color saturation, and a host of other values in your Photoshop images. That’s before you include the dedicated noise reduction, tone-mapping, and sharpening tools that Nik Collection brings to the table.

1 Topaz Photo AI

Expensive, but worth it for the upscaling and noise reduction features

Upscaling images has always been one of the most difficult workloads for machine learning algorithms. Heck, even the most advanced consumer-oriented AI models tend to produce photos riddled with artifacts when upscaling images to a significantly higher resolution. Or at least, that used to be the case until Topaz Photo AI started making the rounds.

On its own, the upscaling facilities offered by Topaz Photo AI are worth the app’s $199 price tag. But once you include the robust de-noising and sharpening features, it’s hard to go back to the standard Photoshop tools, especially if your workload includes editing blurry or low-resolution images.

What are your favorite Photoshop plugins?

Besides the five plugins we’ve mentioned on this list, there are quite a lot of third-party utilities worth trying out. For instance, the $20 Animator's Toolbar Pro plugin provides a simple yet efficient UI to create animations directly in Photoshop. Then there’s Retouch4me’s Frequency Separation plugin that’s perfect for detailed retouching if you’re on a budget.

Either way, one thing’s for certain: if you’ve just stepped into the vast world of Adobe Creative Cloud extensions, you should prepare yourself (and your wallet) as you’re bound to spend many hours scouring the Adobe Exchange marketplace for the perfect set of extensions!